


Lover's Translation

by Nebulad



Series: Sea of Stars [12]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 16:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6158926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebulad/pseuds/Nebulad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meeting Faust for the first time, he admittedly hadn’t heard a plethora of human names. He’d seen them written with helpful phonetic pronunciations in Turian from his fellow officers, but that was usually all they were; translations of perp names he didn’t care to know anyway.</p><p><i>Faou-st</i> had been different and he’d caught himself turning it over in his mind, trying to make his mouth make the same noises hers did. He couldn’t— hell, he was pretty sure his vocal chords were incapable of even coming close— but he’d tried for a long time before giving up and refocusing on excuses to make her say her own name. He safely referred to her as ‘shepherd’, which wasn’t correct but could be translated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lover's Translation

Garrus had been hesitant about their ‘cuddle pillow’ at first, but it was a necessity. Faust wasn’t like all his past dates— he literally ran the risk of sandpapering a layer off her, and she was too soft to relax against plate. The cuddle pillow was a body length solution to their problem that was fuzzy and warm and had little fleece pyjaks on it. He’d thought it’d be burdensome to have between them— sort of a mood killer too, to be honest— but it was also thinner than he’d expected and Faust was cuddlier than he’d taken her for.

It made movie night a lot better now that he could play with her hair while she watched whatever weird human movie she picked. He tried to keep up but there were two humans that looked _so much_ alike and he _knew_ they weren’t the same person but had long since lost track of which of them was acting in which timeline. “What’s the DJ’s name again?” he asked.

“Antoine,” she muttered, her eyes still fixed on the screen. His translator helpfully informed him that there was no Turian equivalent to convey, but that happened a lot with human names. If he was being honest, he liked hearing Shepard say words that couldn’t be regurgitated in Turian— he got to hear her voice entirely unfiltered by the translator. It was different than when he’d been introduced to Alenko and heard a rough, friendly _Kaydihn,_ or when Shep had found him on Omega and from beside her, the Cerberus operative had let out a short _Merahndah._

Meeting Faust for the first time, he admittedly hadn’t heard a plethora of human names. He’d seen them written with helpful phonetic pronunciations in Turian from his fellow officers, but that was usually all they were; translations of perp names he didn’t care to know anyway.

 _Faou-st_ had been different and he’d caught himself turning it over in his mind, trying to make his mouth make the same noises hers did. He couldn’t— hell, he was pretty sure his vocal chords were incapable of even coming close— but he’d tried for a long time before giving up and refocusing on excuses to make her say her own name. He safely referred to her as ‘shepherd’, which wasn’t correct but could be translated.

Kaidan called him _gare-uss,_ and Miranda did the same although hers was altered just a little bit— _gah-russ._ Faust called him _gare-rous_ — it wasn’t _quite_ his name, but as close as she could get with her flexible lips and weird vocal chords.

 _Faou-st_ and _Gare-rous_.

He abruptly snapped back into the movie when he heard… sounds. “Do humans actually have sex like that?” he asked, uncertain if he should be looking. She didn’t seem bothered either way, but there was a small part of him that was still squeamish from years of watching movies with his parents and younger sister. Logically it followed that he was probably allowed to look at a sex scene in the presence of someone he had previously had sex _with_ , but… he was gunna play it safe. He wasn’t even entirely certain he _wanted_ to know what two humans looked like together.

“It certainly looks that way,” she said, finally breaking her eye contact with the screen. “How lost are you?” She grinned at him and he tried to shrug nonchalantly.

“I think I’m fairly certain of which humans are female at this point.” She called him something the translator didn’t catch, but shimmied up to kiss his jaw plates. On impulse, he tried to say her name— it didn’t come out right, the emphasis already thrown off by natural turian speech patterns and mottled by his attempt at flexing his mouth. It made her laugh, though, which was another thing that didn’t get filtered through the translator.

“The fuck was that?” She slid back down to lay back to front, but her attention on the movie was broken.

“Your name— kind of,” he admitted.

“Faust,” she said helpfully. Her name bent her lips and he wondered at the fact that out of all species in the galaxy, it was the turians, hanar, and elcor that weren’t capable of speaking any asari, quarian, or human languages. He never thought he’d have anything in common with a hanar. “How do you say _your_ name?”

He said it, flat out in the sort of annoying way that his dad insisted it was pronounced (he tended to slur it a bit, but he figured that would make it even harder for her to understand). She grinned like she always did when he spoke his language and it wasn’t filtered, her hands tugging at a loose pyjak decal. She puckered her mouth, and chirped out what amounted to a mixture of absolute gibberish and baby talk, and he laughed so abruptly he snorted.

“Was I close?”

“Is my life in danger if I say no?” She rolled her eyes and didn’t answer for a second, looking down at her omnitool thoughtfully.

“What do you call the others?”

“Most human names have a phonetic equivalent in at least one dialect. Translators will spit out the name and it’s usually seamless— I checked, though. Faust isn’t included.” That’d been disappointing, but in fairness it wasn’t a very popular add-on; humans and turians still didn’t play nice, so it was mostly used by people who worked abroad. It was by no means comprehensive and the only updates it got were for notable human diplomats and business people.

“Can we add it? Is there like— here give me your omnitool.”

“It’s in Turian Common.”

“There’s a French setting.”

“No there isn’t.”

“Yes there is, I put it there. Let’s go Vakarian, omni-tool.” He took it off and they traded, although he wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do with hers (he clicked around to try and figure out where the language settings were to install a TC interface). Faust seemed to know his pretty well, and by the time he looked up again he could only recognize the app she was playing with through virtue of the pictures.

“‘Have your human partner—’ that’s me, but I don’t think they meant _partner_ partner— ‘slowly and clearly pronounce their name… this app does not guarantee the accuracy of names longer than five syllables... ‘,” she trailed off, then moved onto the basic information form. “One syllable, German, Latin derived…”

“How do you know all that?” he asked.

“My name isn’t very common,” she replied absently, still clicking buttons and filling in boxes. “Okay, don’t make any noise while I do this.”

He watched carefully as she slowly pronounced each sound— the hiss of the F, the way her lips flexed for the _au_ , _s,_ and landing on a hard _t._ He waited, breathlessly, for the inevitable moment where the app apologized and asked her to repeat— probably indefinitely. He’d gotten that trying to add the name of a human diplomat from somewhere called Texas once. The man’s accent had made it impossible for the voice recognition system to work.

Then he heard her name, clear as a bell, being chirped at him in TC. He stiffened and so did she, looking at him half hysterically. “Was that it?” she asked, her voice jumping pitch. She must have just heard her first name, maybe spoken a little strangely but otherwise familiar. He repeated it, and she grinned wildly. “Does it sound nice in Turian?”

 _Faust, Faust, Faust, Faust._ “It sounds perfect,” he told her, and she shoved him roughly. She was beaming so bright it was like making eye contact with a star— he had her name. Better yet he had a word for her name that didn’t exist anywhere else except for between the two of them.

She snatched back her own omni-tool (he was still too stunned to request that she fix his language interface) and opened what he vaguely recognized as the Official Alliance Interior Translator Modification Program. She hit a few buttons then held her wrist up to his face. “Say my name,” she urged him.

“Faust,” he breathed, still sort of dizzy about having an equivalent. He’d gotten so used to _Shepard_ that this seemed… _incredibly_ intimate. The translator read back the name, and then again in TC. “What are you doing?”

“When you say my name, I want to hear _you_ say it in _your_ language. The only way to learn to respond to it is to make sure it doesn’t get translated,” she explained, closing her eyes.

“Faust,” he repeated. She was red like he was mumbling something dirty, and whistled something back at him with the same emphasis but without any real words. He didn’t bother to correct her— it was time better spent making up for years of not being able to say her weird human name, and he had a long way to go.

**Author's Note:**

> it is way too late for me to be awake but the sooner i go to sleep the sooner I have to go to my friday class and i hate my friday class with a passion regularly reserved for like dentist appointments. also I left a bunch of species out of the one bit where garrus thinks about alien language but for honest? 1) I havent decided what I want salarians, batarians, and vorcha to sound like 2) who the fuck knows about the lil..... volus
> 
> anyway [this is my writing blog](http://www.nebulaad.tumblr.com) (god I hope that html works HOO BOY) and I have other stuff there too. [here's the link to find more fic](http://nebulaad.tumblr.com/tagged/wtf)


End file.
